Nineteenth Century Questions

by James Freeman Clarke

If we return to Rousseau, and compare his influence with that of Voltaire, we shall find that it went far deeper. Voltaire was a man of immense talent. Talent originates nothing, but formulates into masterly expression what has come to it from the age in which it lives. Not a new idea can be found, we believe, in all Voltaire's innumerable writings. But genius has a vision of ideal truth. It is a prophet of the future. Rousseau, with his many faults, weaknesses, follies, was a man of genius. He was probably the most eloquent writer of French prose who has ever appeared. He was a man possessed by his ideas. He had none of the adroitness, wit, ingenuity, of Voltaire. Instead of amassing an enormous fortune, he supported himself by copying music. Instead of being surrounded by admirers and flatterers, he led a solitary life, alone with his ideas. Instead of denying the authorship of his works, and so giving an excuse to the authorities to leave him quiet, he put his name to his writings. He worked for his bread with his hands, and in his "Emile" he recommended that all boys should be taught some manual craft. Voltaire ridiculed the gentleman carpenter of Rousseau; but before that generation passed away, many a French nobleman had reason to lament that he had not been taught to use the saw and the plane.

If Voltaire belonged to the eighteenth century, and brought to a brilliant focus its scattered rays, Rousseau belonged more to the nineteenth. Amidst the persiflage, the mockery, the light and easy philosophy, of his day, he stood, "among them, but not of them, in a crowd of thoughts which were not their thoughts." This is the true explanation of his weakness and strength, and of the intense dislike felt for him by Voltaire and the school of Voltaire. They belonged to their time, Rousseau to a coming time.

The eighteenth century, especially in France, was one in which nature was at its minimum and art at its maximum. All was art. But art separated from nature becomes artificial, not to say artful. Decorum was the law in morals; the bienséances and convenances ruled in society. The stage was bound by conventional rules. Poetry walked in silk attire, and made its toilette with the elaborate dignity of the levée of the Grand Monarque. Against all this Rousseau led the reaction—the reaction inevitable as destiny. As art had been pushed to an extreme, so now naturalism was carried to the opposite extreme. Rousseau was the apostle of nature in all things. Children were to be educated by the methods of nature, not according to the routine of old custom. Governments were to go back to their origin in human nature; society was to be reorganized on first principles. This voice crying in the wilderness was like the trumpet of doom to the age, announcing the age to come. It laid the axe at the root of the tree. Its outcome was the French Revolution, that rushing, mighty flood, which carried away the throne, the aristocracy, the manners, laws, and prejudices of the past.

In his first great work, the work which startled Europe, Rousseau recalled man to himself. He said, "The true philosophy is to commune with one's self,"—the greatest saying, thinks Henri Martin, that had been pronounced in that century. Rousseau condemned luxury, and uttered a prophetic cry of woe over the tangled perplexities of the time. "There is no longer a remedy, unless through some great revolution, almost as much to be feared as the evil it would cure,—which it is blamable to desire, impossible to foresee."

"Man is naturally good," says Rousseau. Before the frightful words "mine" and "thine" were invented, how could there have been, he asks, any vices or crimes? He denounced all slavery, all inequality, all forms of oppression. His writings were full of exaggeration, but, says the French historian, "no sooner had he opened his lips than he restored earnestness to the world." The same writer, after speaking of the faults of the "Nouvelle Héloïse," adds that nevertheless "a multitude of the letters of his 'Julie' are masterpieces of eloquence, passion, and profundity; and the last portions are signalized by a moral purity, a wisdom of views, and a religious elevation altogether new in the France of the eighteenth century." Concerning "Emile," he says, "It is the profoundest study of human nature in our language; it was an ark of safety, launched by Providence on the waves of skepticism and materialism. If Rousseau had been stricken out of the eighteenth century, whither, we seriously ask, would the human mind have drifted?"[43]

The "Social Contract" appeared in 1762. In this work Rousseau swept away by his powerful eloquence the arguments which placed sovereignty elsewhere than in the hands of the people. This fundamental idea was the seed corn which broke from the earth in the first Revolution, and bears its ripe fruit in republican France to-day. D'Alembert, who disliked Rousseau, said of "Emile" that "it placed him at the head of all writers." The "Social Contract," illogical and unsound in many things, yet tore down the whole framework of despotism. Van Laun, a more recent historian, tells us that Rousseau was a man of the people, who knew all their wants; that every vice he attacked was one that they saw really present in their midst; that he "opened the flood-gates of suppressed desires, which gushed forth, overwhelming a whole artificial world." Villemain writes that the words of Rousseau, "descending like a flame of fire, moved the souls of his contemporaries;" and that "his books glow with an eloquence which can never pass away." Morley, to whom Rousseau is essentially antipathic, says of the "Social Contract" that its first words, "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains," thrilled two continents,—that it was the gospel of the Jacobins; and the action of the convention in 1794 can be explained only by the influence of Rousseau. He taught France to believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Locke had already taught this doctrine in England, where it produced no such violent outbreak, because it encountered no such glaring abuses.

Such is the striking contrast between these two greatest writers in modern French literature. It is singular to observe their instinctive antagonism in every point of belief and character. The merits of one are precisely opposite to those of the other: their faults are equally opposed.

The events of Voltaire's life have been so often told that Mr. Parton has not been able to add much to our knowledge of his biography. He was born in 1694 and died in 1778, at the age of eighty-four, though at his birth he was so feeble that those who believe that the world's progress depends on the survival of the fittest would have thought him not fit to be brought up. This was also the case with Goethe and Walter Scott. His father was a notary, and the name Arouet had that of Voltaire added to it, it being a name in his mother's family. This affix was adopted by the lad when in the Bastille, at the age of twenty-four. As a duck takes to water, so Voltaire took to his pen. In his twelfth year he wrote verses addressed to the Dauphin, which so pleased the famous Ninon de l'Enclos, then in her ninetieth year, that she left the boy a legacy of two thousand francs. He went to a Jesuits' school, and always retained a certain liking for the Jesuits. His father wished to make him a notary, but he would "pen a stanza when he should engross;" and the usual struggles between the paternal purpose and the filial instinct ended, as usual, in the triumph of the latter. He led a wild career for a time, in the society of dissipated abbès, debauched noblemen, and women to whom pleasure was the only object. Suspected of having written a lampoon on the death of Louis XIV., he was sent to the Bastille, and came forth not only with a new name, but with literature as his aim for the rest of his life. His first play appeared on the stage in 1718, and from that time he continued to write till his death. He traveled from the château of one nobleman to another, pouring out his satires and sarcasms through the press; threatened by the angry rulers and priests who governed France, but always escaping by some adroit manœuvre. In England he became a deist and a mathematician. His views of Christ and Christianity were summed up in a quatrain which may be thus translated. Speaking of Jesus, he says,—

"His actions are holy, his ethics divine;
Into hearts which are wounded he pours oil and wine.
And if, through imposture, those truths are received,
It still is a blessing to be thus deceived."

He lived many years at Cirey with the Marchioness of Châtelet; the marquis, her husband, accepting the curious relation without any objection. Then followed the still stranger episode of his residence with Frederic the Great, their love quarrels and reconciliations. After this friendship came to an end, Voltaire went to live near Geneva in Switzerland, but soon bought another estate just out of Switzerland, in France, and a third a short distance away, in the territory of another power. Thus, if threatened in one state, he could easily pass into another. Here he lived and worked till the close of his life, an untiring writer. He was a man of infinite wit, kind-hearted, with little malignity of any sort, wishing in the main to do good. His violent attacks upon Christianity may be explained by the fact of the corruptions of the Church which were around him. The Church of France in that day, in its higher circles, was a persecuting Church, yet without faith: greedy for wealth, living in luxury, careless of the poor, and well deserving the attacks of Voltaire. That he could not look deeper and see the need of religious institutions of a better sort was his misfortune.